A pilcrow is one of these: ¶. I didn’t know that. The little printer’s mark is
unvoiced but eloquent, sundering streams of prose, heralding new paragraphs
or staking out subclauses. It crops up often in legal and academic
documents, but in fiction you would only expect to see one as an avant-garde
manoeuvre, pegged into a page by an author who wanted to interrupt a
conventional illusion, to alert the reader to something imposed or
artificial. I suspect McSweeney’s uses them a lot.
Adam Mars-Jones started out as a sort of avant-garde writer. An early triad of
long short stories, published in 1981 as Lantern Lecture, combined reportage
and invention in a bizarre, original way, managing to encompass the famously
eccentric Philip Yorke, the last squire of Erddig Manor in North Wales and
probably the best-loved fascist in modern British history, a case of rabies
contracted by her Majesty the Queen (and her subsequent solemn euthanasia)
and the career and trial of a notorious robber, kidnapper and murderer. The
AIDS emergency of the middle 1980s effected a change in his work, which
became bigger-hearted and more purely documentary (rather as a war artist
will set aside an experimental technique in favour of heroic realism for the
duration of hostilities). The Waters of Thirst (1993), the closest thing to
a novel Mars-Jones had yet published (despite not one but two citations in
Granta’s young literary lions list), continued in this vein, but it
contained promising elements of fantasy and derangement amid all the dinner
parties and how-shall-we-live. Now, with Pilcrow, he has undeniably
increased his heftiness quotient. Nobody is going to mistake this large book
for a novella. He has crafted something at once familiar and strange, a
narrative where preoccupations which have exercised both his fiction and his
journalism over two and a half decades are polished and revisited. It is an
impressive piece of work. It is also a curiously uncongenial novel; though
one has to resort to Mars-Jones’s essays and reviews if one wants to work
out why.
The novel takes the form of a memoir, leading us through the 1950s childhood
of one John Cromer. An attack of rheumatoid arthritis, or Still’s disease,
at three, is misdiagnosed as rheumatic fever and treated, exactly wrongly,
with a period of bed rest:
"There were squatters in my knees wrecking the premises, and they showed no
sign of moving on. In fact somehow they were inviting their cronies to join
the party, to occupy my hips and elbows, ankles, wrists and shoulders, until
there was a general involvement of the joints in misery, pain and swelling."
John’s joints are left immobilized, “ankylosed” (he has the clever child’s –
and the writer’s – weakness for verbal exotica). His body is stiffened,
distorted and bowed by pain (he is a Stradivarius of pain). Strapped into a
series of harnesses, frames and chairs, he is wheeled off to a couple of
gruesome “special” institutions for some perfunctory, and at times downright
sadistic, schooling, until, in what we feel must be a decisive finale, he
succeeds in getting himself transferred back to the human race, in the form
of a local grammar school.
That is about all the plot there is. John narrates as an adult. He has picked
up some Eastern philosophy since the events he retells, and believes that on
a karmic level he chose his present body – or, at least, the womb which held
it. Thus, it may be as a result of enlightened acceptance that he does not
show much distance from the childish self he puts before us. Little John is
a clever boy, to be sure (clever, not least, at exploiting adults’ sympathy
for his affliction). He sees and understands a lot. But big John still views
the world of his childhood as if through a forest of grown-up legs. This may
be a wheelchair’s eye view as much as a child’s, of course; but it does mean
that he tends to objectify significant adults – objects of crushes (he is
frankly and straightforwardly homosexual from a very early age), images of
authority, would-be torturers – to a remarkable degree. One exception is his
mother, who is partly given to us in good 1950s housewife fashion, as a
confection of surfaces, but who also gets the nearest thing to love that
John has to offer (though he often claims to love widely and freely, being
an avowed teacher’s pet, for instance). His father, by contrast, is the
object of a faintly pornographic desire; his idiotically mannered RAF speech
cannot diminish the allure of his flexed quadriceps. Yet in love as in other
areas, John is oddly incurious. There is some sort of feud between his
mother and grandmother. There is also a desperate, chronic anxiety about
social and material status (the two being markedly different during the
period under review). These are themes which probably run through many
childhoods. You might not get to the bottom of them when you are small, but
you would think piecing together some sort of understanding of them later to
be the beginning of wisdom – more interesting to look back on, at any rate,
than the yellow-rosed wallpaper in John’s old bedroom, about which we get to
read a great deal.
In fact, Pilcrow approaches the summoning up of the past, specifically the
decade of John’s childhood, in a markedly ambivalent way. Key decisions
taken over John’s young life turn out to have been cruelly, catastrophically
misguided. His disability legitimizes treatment of him in various
institutions as a sort of laboratory animal rather than a person. He could
be forgiven for feeling angry about it, whatever his guru says. Yet in all
the period detail strewn around, the diligent evocations of now-vanished
petty-bourgeois diction (which mingle in John’s recollections with the
euphemisms and elaborations of childish speech), the toys and trinkets made
from substances now vanished or outlawed – tin, cardboard, radium – is a
palpable nostalgia (the novel’s dedication to the memory of the Net Book
Agreement may be relevant here). You could even say that John’s eventual
deus ex machina, a grammar school, is another holy relic of the period. It
may be that we are all equivocal about our childhoods, caught between
resentment and tenderness, lacking as we do much sense of agency or control
over the ordinary madness of our own families while we are embedded in them.
Yet, while he is manifestly unusual by customary standards, John is a familiar
type in Mars-Jones’s oeuvre. He is, without being wicked or malicious,
essentially a psychopath: good at pleasing others, good despite his bodily
inflexibility at shaping himself to them, full of guile, but with a small
empty space somewhere at the heart of him. He reflects a peculiar
ruthlessness on the part of his creator – not just the ruthlessness every
good writer owes his characters, but a sort of blind spot which Mars-Jones
often shows in his fiction and his criticism alike. When he writes as an
aside in a pot-boiling interview that listening to “Ne Me Quitte Pas” makes
him feel as if there is a chihuahua pawing at his leg, you enjoy the comedy
of the image, but you thank God you’re not dating the man. When, in a story
collected in both A Darker Proof and Monopolies of Loss, he has a
sympathetic, and not especially comic, character think about trying to pick
up new friends at AIDS funerals (“If he could get someone back . . . then
there was something he could set against the wear and tear”) he is
documenting the topsy-turviness of a dark time; but it is as if he hasn’t
quite noticed the coldness of the thought.
None of these doubts should detract from the richness or rich-and-strangeness
of Pilcrow. Mars-Jones has written about disease before – not just AIDS, but
polycystic kidney syndrome, which the narrator of The Waters of Thirst has,
and the cinema’s treatment of disability in an LRB piece, which
surfaced in extended remix form in Blind Bitter Happiness (1997). Beyond the
ambig-uities of the novel’s title (and the visual appearance, clubbed and
splinted, of the sign it denotes), I’m not sure John Cromer should be seen
as any kind of allegorical figure; nevertheless, the novel’s theme of coping
with constraint and diminution might be said to apply to people (that is,
affluent Western people) with AIDS, now that the medical management of the
virus has improved. John’s disinclination to be filed away in a subset of
society because of attributes he did not choose fits in with things
Mars-Jones has written about homosexuality – and just because someone is a
member of a minority doesn’t mean they have to be likeable, of course. But
Pilcrow is, apart from all else, too subtle a book to be programmatic. It
renders the interior voice of an exceptional being agilely and plausibly,
and it does justice to a peculiar historical moment, both brutal and
byzantine, bright with possibility yet thicketed with codes and conventions.
It is also, in places, very funny. But it does give off a certain chill.
Adam Mars-Jones
PILCROW
525pp. Faber. £18.99.
978 0 571 21703 8
Keith Miller is a freelance writer living in London. His book about St
Peter's Basilica was published last year.
